Frontal cortex emesis between novels.

Fall

My friend JC (not a bumbling reference to our Lord & Saviour, for once) just posted this on his Facebook wall. It resonates:

Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of ‘falling in love’ has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, ‘knowing’ that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment. – From “A Dialogue on Love,” Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick

If this is true, I do it at least twice a year, maybe more. Is it possible to fall in love with your friends, mentors, & inspirations? A whole church? Of course it’s not the mature partner love you grow over time, but it is the heady rush of knowing that this person, this him or her that you can’t stop talking about, is your new brain crush, & there is no distinction, I believe, neurochemically, between being excited by intellectual/spiritual connection & romantic idealization.

This is why I know grown ass straight men who squeal over other grown ass straight men.

We call it the “man crush” or the “girl crush” these days. It’s a real thing. But maybe it is better described in the above quote.

The difference between me & a teenaged girl is that I was accelerated beyond the speed of light & then returned to Earth, having seemed to age some. Also my brain crushes don’t evaporate with heat. They just…adjust.